Norway's Yes-To-OOXML Is Formally Protested

An anonymous reader writes "Norway's yes-to-OOXML may tip the vote in favor of accepting it as an ISO-standard, but the committee chairman just faxed a formal protest to the ISO. 'I am writing to you in my capacity as Chairman (of 13 years standing) of the Norwegian mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34. I wish to inform you of serious irregularities in connection with the Norwegian vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Office Open XML) and to lodge a formal protest. You will have been notified that Norway voted to approve OOXML in this ballot. This decision does not reflect the view of the vast majority of the Norwegian committee, 80% of which was against changing Norway's vote from No with comments to Yes.'"

Comments

Money can't buy you love.

[inTheLoo]

Or truth or science. A lie is a lie no matter how many people you pay to repeat it. Corruption has no place in any technical organization that will be litened to and respected.

Groklaw predicts more challenges

and notes the results will now be announced on Wednesday, so and ISO standard for M$XML is not going to be one of the worst April Fools jokes of the next decade.

Stupid governments

[Anonymous Coward]

"This decision does not reflect the view of the vast majority of the Norwegian committee, 80% of which was against changing Norway's vote from No with comments to Yes."

This is why we need open source governance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_governance

Nice Sentiment

[MightyMartian]

It's a nice gesture, but it's a lost cause. The ISO has been undermined by Redmond and its agents, and now an unimplementable file format will give Microsoft the highground it needs to peddle its monopoly, to the detriment of anyone interested in a real open file standard.

I leave it to the EU (as the US DoJ clearly has no interest in this any more) to take Microsoft to task, and hopefully empty their coffers a little bit. That seems to be the only thing to be done with Microsoft until the time comes when they're anti-competitive behavior is finally met by government agencies of sufficient power to break the company up.

Re:Nice Sentiment

[Chris Burke]

All that will happen, in the long run, is that ISO will become untrusted, marginalized and obsolete.

With Microsoft's Office monopoly becoming further entrenched as a side effect. Haha, side effect? More like the point of the whole operation.

Here's the deal as it stands right now (or rather shortly before this farce began):
- ISO was well respected.
- Open Document Format was accepted by ISO as a standard.

These two things combined give Open Office (and any suite that implements ODF, since its an ACTUAL open standard so you can do that) a lot of built-in approval, and makes them look very good to governments/organizations who are starting to mandate open formats for documentation. This is bad for MS, half of their business being the Office monopoly (which supports and is supported by the Windows monopoly).

So what's their strategy here? Well one (or both) of two things happen:
- Their BS non-open "open standard" is accepted, so they can claim their format meets the needs of governments who mandate open standards.
- ISO is no longer respected as a standards organization, so their approval of ODF no longer means as much.

Whichever happens, their little problem with ODF being a standard goes away and MS Office remains the only "standard" (de-facto or ISO-approved) that matters. They don't really care which. Oh no, their manipulation of the process is exposed! Guess that means you can't trust ISO any more! Frankly I give even odds to both happening. But even if ISO ends up rejecting OOXML, it's going to take a hell of a lot to stop the second from happening.

Quality base-level of ISO very LOW

[omz]

If you want to see how bad was this process handled, see one of its awfuls deliverables.

Open the document "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" in this zip

http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0989_reference_docs.zip

This is one of the changes frenetically accepted in BRM, regarding treatments of dates in OOXML. See the salad of colors trying to explain the modifications. And this is a fix ( BRM ) of a fix ( one of ECMA 1027 proposed fixes ) of a NB comment of a draft text ( original ECMA submission ).

And this document contradicts this another BRM document: http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0989.pdf because the first says that the .DOC file replaces ECMA responses 18 and 43 but the "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" document says that it replaces ECMA responses 18, 43, 76 and 690 !

ECMA and Microsoft have not provided a final text with all this changes applied. In the BRM they frenetically changed Scope, Conformance , Schemas , and lot of normative text. Microsoft is now rushing to get a final text in less than one month, to comply with ISO normative.

This is how ISO delivers IT international standards, mandating fundamental changes to drafts, leaving national bodies with the only alternative to cast a political vote leaving aside the technical content of the specification.

Congratulations to the countries that had *balls* and didn't agree with this way of deliver standards to people:

• New Zealand ( dissaproved )
• Brasil ( dissaproved )
• India ( dissaproved )
• China ( dissaproved )
• South Africa ( dissaproved )
• Canada ( dissaproved )
• Venezuela ( dissaproved )
• Ecuador ( dissaproved )
• Iran ( dissaproved )
• Italy ( abstained )
• Spain ( abstained )
• Belgium ( abstained )
• Netherlands ( abstained but only Microsoft opposed the disapproval )
• France ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Malaysia ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Australia ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure, government opposed OOXML )
• Kenya ( abstained )

And congratulations Microsoft, your friendly little countries supposedly experts in XML document description languages ;-) ( now ISO P-members ), who joined ISO JTC1 just to cast an unconditional-yes-votes payed off:

• Jamaica
• Cyprus
• Malta
• Kazakhstan
• Lebanon
• Azerbaijan
• Cote-d'Ivore
• Pakistan

Use the Judo Argument

[dpilot]

OK, So Microsoft has most likely gotten OOXML passed as an ISO standard. Unfortunate, but probably true.

Further, it appears that the real reason they did this is so that they can put that all-important checkmark in the box that says, "Interoperates with ISO standard file formats" when trying to sell MS Office into accounts.

OK, great.

Now PROVE IT!

Prove that MS Office is OOXML compliant. Last I heard, OOXML was like Office 2007, but not really there. Last I heard, OOXML was an incomplete spec with no full implementation.

If Microsoft is going to to for that "ISO standard file format" checkbox, for that matter if anyone is going for an ISO standard checkbox, isn't it necessary that there be compliance testing? And long as we're compliance testing, the certification of compliance should NEVER be given until the appropriate committee evaluates the product against the spec and decides that that the product unambiguously implements the spec.

No full, unambiguous compliance, no check in the little box.

No matter how long the evaluation takes.